The 15 best school-centric films

For good or ill––or, more accurately, for good and ill––school is a foundational building block of who we become. The classroom is where we learn to read, write, and do arithmetic, of course, but the instruction does not end there. There are critical lessons to be had in the cafeteria, the locker rooms, the playground: truths that concern authority, conformity, popularity, competition, and rebellion. No wonder school has long been fertile ground for the movies.

15. Three O’Clock High (1987, dir: Phil Joanou)

Sometimes the pathos of the 1980s teen flick went no further than how to avoid getting one’s ass kicked. Jerry Mitchell (Casey Siemaszko), the hero in the agreeably silly Three O’Clock High, makes the grave mistake of inadvertently pissing off a psychopathic new student named Buddy Revell (Richard Tyson), who vows to decimate our protagonist once school lets out at 3 p.m. Desperate to save his skin, Jerry’s bad decisions continue to mount in a sort of school-centric version of Martin Scorsese’s After Hours (1985). Three O’Clock High disappeared shortly after its release—a real head-scratcher in light of the imaginative visual work of Phil Joanou and cinematographer Barry Sonenfeld.

14. Pretty Maids All in a Row (1971, dir: Roger Vadim)

Revisiting this shockingly inappropriate quasi-skin flick from the enlightened perch of the 21st century, Pretty Maids All in a Row feels like it could just as well be a cultural artifact from debauched Rome instead of 1970s America. Horndog moviemaker Roger Vadim, better known for his relationships with beautiful women (Brigitte Bardot, Catherine Deneuve, Jane Fonda) than for his directorial acumen, made his U.S. debut with this creepy dark comedy of sex and murder in high school. Rock Hudson plays a beloved guidance counselor who beds—statutorily rapes—a seemingly endless procession of comely students; a pre-Kojak Telly Savalas is a police lieutenant on the trail of several in-school homicides; and Angie Dickinson is a naive sexpot teacher.

13. Rock ’n’ Roll High School (1979, dir: Allan Arkush)

If only my school had been half as bitchin’ as Rock ‘n’ Roll High School’s Vince Lombardi High (our graduation theme song was Christopher Cross’ decidedly non-rocking “Ride Like the Wind”). B-movie king Roger Corman originally wanted a cheap teen flick to cash in on the disco craze. Thankfully, cooler heads (and I mean “cool” in the “cool” sense) prevailed, and The Ramones became the featured band after Cheap Trick and Todd Rundgren passed on the project. The adorable P.J. Soles plays Ramones superfan Riff Randall, with the awesome Mary Woronov as the villainous principal who hates all things rock ‘n’ roll. Clint Howard plays a teen fixer who sells fake IDs and hall passes from his bathroom-stall office. Schlocky bliss.

12. Brick (2005, dir: Rian Johnson)

In his feature debut, writer-director Rian Johnson indulged his love for Dashiell Hammett detective novels by transplanting a hardboiled detective into high school. Johnson returned to his San Clemente, California, alma mater to enlist the help of friends in filming Brick over weekends and after classes. Joseph Gordon-Levitt portrays student Brendan Frye, whose investigation into an ex-girlfriend’s death leads him to a drug-dealing kingpin (Lukas Haas) with a mom who likes to serve orange juice. Deliberately paced and impressively weird, Brick is an inventive mesh of neo-noir and teen intrigue, and it presaged how Johnson would further hone the whodunit genre with his Knives Out franchise.

11. 10 Things I Hate About You (1999, dir: Gil Junger)

This lovely romcom owes its existence in part to the success of another school-centric movie on this list. Inspired by how Clueless updated Jane Austen’s Emma, screenwriters Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith decided a wry reworking of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew was in order. 10 Things I Hate About You served up an irresistibly sweet-natured vision of high school. It is a place for playful crushes, even when the crushees are as seemingly star-crossed as perpetually angry Kat Stratford (Julia Stiles) and Australian stud Patrick Verona (Heath Ledger). Young Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Larisa Oleynik are fine in supporting roles, but the picture squarely belongs to Stiles and Ledger, both of whom were actually of high school age when they were cast––not a common phenomenon for teen flicks. Their charisma and chemistry get a solid A.
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10. Carrie (1976, dir: Brian De Palma) 

Stephen King understood high school can be a real horror show. Part of what makes Brian De Palma’s adaptation of King’s first novel such an enduring chiller is that it taps into the angst of the institution. Carrie White (Sissy Spacek) is the outcast writ large, a girl so sheltered by her weirdo mother that she thinks she is dying with the arrival of her first period. Her classmates taunt the panicked girl by pelting her with tampons. Carrie’s high school is ruled by mean girls. “There are girls behind the scenes, pulling invisible wires, rigging elections, using their boyfriends as stalking horses,” King writes in his treatise on horror, Danse Macabre. “Against such a backdrop, Carrie becomes doubly pitiful, because she is unable to do any of these things––she can only wait to be saved or damned by the actions of others.”
(See more in 10 memorable movie mothers.)

9. Eighth Grade (2018, dir: Bo Burnham)

Warning: For those of us still suffering post-traumatic stress disorder from middle school, Eighth Grade might trigger cold sweats. The cringe-inducing but darkly humorous picture stars a superb Elsie Fisher as a shy, screen-addicted 13-year-old braving the treacherous waters of social media, school crushes, and pool parties. Comedian-turned-filmmaker Bo Burnham understands how technology has radically transformed the way kids relate to the world and to each other. The result isn’t a simplistic cautionary tale––Eighth Grade is too smart and heartfelt for that––but a pitch-perfect reminder that growing up is as painfully funny as it is painful. In a fitting irony, the MPAA slapped the movie with an R rating for language and mild sexual content, meaning the very audience it speaks to most honestly, actual eighth graders, technically needed a chaperone to see it.

8. The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012, dir: Stephen Chbosky)

John Hughes, for all the love people heap on his 1980s teen movies, went too easy on high school. For many of us, those years were a marathon of self-pity, angst, and anything else you’d find commemorated in the grooves of a Smiths album. That’s what makes The Perks of Being a Wallflower so resonant. It follows Charlie (Logan Lerman), a quiet, withdrawn freshman who bears the psychological scars left from a best friend who committed suicide and a beloved aunt (Melanie Lynskey) who died in a car crash. Things brighten when Charlie meets stepsiblings Patrick and Sam (Ezra Miller and Emma Watson) at peace with their outsider status. Charlie is introduced to drugs, good music, and love. Adapted by Stephen Chbosky from his own YA novel, The Perks of Being a Wallflower captures the operatic mood swings of youth, a time when the perfect song playing over a car radio can ignite infinite possibilities.

7. High School (1968, dir: Frederick Wiseman)

Legendary documentary maker Frederick Wiseman’s sophomore work is a dense, fascinating portrait of life in a Pennsylvania high school. High School exemplifies the richness of Wiseman’s supposedly detached approach. Film critics of the time saw it as evidence of an oppressive education system that valued conformity and respect for authority above all else––and to be sure, High School features plenty of students being chewed out for mild offenses. “It’s nice to be individualistic,” a school administrator cautions a girl over the length of her prom dress, “but there are certain times to be individualistic.” And yet, considering how today’s culture wars largely play out in public school, it can be jarring to see a female teacher in a 1968 sex education class instructing an assembly of girls on how to use the pill.

6. If … (1968, dir: Lindsay Anderson)

The English public school system receives a damned good thrashing in Lindsay Anderson’s drolly vicious black comedy. The upper classmen are sadists who use the “scum” junior boys as quasi-slaves and routinely terrorize anyone showing a “deplorable lack of spirit.” Into this hell, Mick Travis (Malcolm McDowell making his feature debut) and his mates launch a bloody insurrection in keeping with their heroes––Geronimo, Che Guevara, and Mao Zedong––whose posters adorn their dormitory walls. “Violence and revolution are the only pure acts,” Travis says. “War is the last possible creative act.” As film scholar David Thomson writes in Have You Seen…?: A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films, the picture “is rare among public school films in that it has a true loathing of its subject, and not a glimmer of a tranquilizing nostalgia.” Stanley Kubrick was so taken with McDowell’s performance here that he cast the actor as the head hooligan for his ultra-violent A Clockwork Orange (1971).

5. Heathers (1989, dir: Michael Lehman)

Daniel Waters did not lack ambition with his first screenplay. Determined to pen the ultimate high school movie, the then-video store clerk’s initial draft of Heathers exceeded 250 pages. He hoped Stanley Kubrick would direct, but had to settle for rookie director Michael Lehmann. The result was magic of the blackest variety. Veronica (Winona Ryder) is an intelligent, pretty junior who has traded in her dweeby childhood friends in favor of three cold-hearted beauties named Heather (Kim Walker, Shannen Doherty, and Lisanne Falk). Veronica chafes at her cohorts’ cruelty, but, like most of her classmates, she is too scared to challenge their authority. Until, that is, Veronica hooks up with J.D. (Christian Slater), a trenchcoat-clad rebel who has recently moved to town. Murder ensues. “My teen angst bullshit now has a body count,” Veronica confides in her diary. Heathers is a scathingly funny takedown of the high school caste system that spares no one.
(See more in The 10 best black comedies.)

4. Clueless (1995, dir: Amy Heckerling)

Few comedies of the 1990s are as effortlessly effervescent as Clueless. At least it looks effortless. As if! Of course, we know better. While Amy Heckerling has great source material to work from––Clueless is a tongue-in-cheek updating of Jane Austen’s Emma––it can’t be an easy feat to make a protagonist as superficial and ditzy as Cher Horowitz (Alicia Silverstone) so endearing. Cher and best friend Dionne (Stacey Dash) are at the top of the social hierarchy at fictional Bronson Alcott High School in the presumably real Beverly Hills. There is winning support from Paul Rudd as Cher’s stepbrother/love interest (let’s just move on, shall we?), but this is Silverstone’s movie through and through. Some of the pop-culture references are past their expiration date (Pauly Shore, the Baldwin brothers), but no matter. Clueless is a charming time capsule of a very specific time, from the vernacular to the fashions. Just as she did with Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Heckerling knows how to do the seemingly impossible and make school look fun.

3. Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982, dir: Amy Heckerling)

In 1978, 22-year-old music journalist Cameron Crowe returned to high school, undercover, for what became the book Fast Times at Ridgemont High: A True Story. His eventual screenplay jibed with the sensibility of first-time director Amy Heckerling, with the resulting alchemy transcending the rote teen flick that the studio had expected. For every bit of stoner hilarity provided by Sean Penn as surfer Jeff Spicoli or romantic misadventures involving Mark and Stacy (Brian Backer and Jennifer Jason Leigh), there is more serious fare. A scene in which Stacy loses her virginity to a 26-year-old stereo salesman in a dingy baseball dugout is as gut-wrenching as it is awkwardly funny. The appealing cast boasted several standouts––including Phoebe Cates, Judge Reinhold, and Forest Whitaker, to name a few––whose careers blossomed soon afterward.
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2. The Breakfast Club (1985, dir: John Hughes)

Five high schoolers––”a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess and a criminal,” if you wanna boil them down to archetypes––meet for Saturday morning detention, learn about one another, dance, smoke weed, argue, and depart for the day all the wiser (and maybe going steady). That plotline set the stage for what became one of the 1980s’ most beloved pictures. “When you grow up, your heart dies,” says Allison (Ally Sheedy), The Breakfast Club’s proverbial “basket case.” Thankfully, that heart kept pumping for John Hughes, whose sophomore directorial outing explores the pressures of high school without condescension or irony. Far less endearing is the film’s treatment of Molly Ringwald’s character being sexually violated in a scene creepily played for laughs. Ringwald, Sheedy, Emilio Estevez, Judd Nelson, and Anthony Michael Hall will forever be associated with the landmark film. Notably, only Ringwald and Hall were still teenagers when they filmed in Hughes’ native Illinois.
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1. Election (1999, dir: Alexander Payne)

Didn’t we all know a Tracy Flick in high school, that gratingly confident and capable overachiever whose hand always shot up first when the teacher asked for the answer? I’m laying odds that you did. Similarly, I’m betting you also knew a version of Jim McAllister, that middle-aged teacher who made no effort to hide his disdain for some students and approval of others. In adapting Tom Perrotta’s novel Election for the big screen, Alexander Payne and co-writer Jim Taylor satirize with clinical precision the relationships and rivalries in an Omaha, Nebraska, high school (Payne moved the book’s New Jersey setting to his Midwest stomping grounds). Reese Witherspoon gave a breakthrough comic performance as Tracy Flick, whose campaign for class president incurs the wrath of Matthew Broderick, equally terrific as the progressively unhinged civics teacher, Mr. McAllister, who cannot stomach a Flick victory.
(See more in The 10 best black comedies and The 10 most memorable movie teachers.)

Honorable mention: American Teen (2008, dir. Nanette Burstein), The Class (2008, dir. Laurent Cantet), Cooley High (1975, dir. Michael Schultz), Elephant (2003, dir. Gus Van Sant), Fame (1980, dir. Alan Parker), High School Confidential! (1958, dir. Jack Arnold), The Holdovers (2023, dir. Alexander Payne), Lady Bird (2017, dir. Greta Gerwig), Mean Girls (2004, dir. Mark Waters), Napoleon Dynamite (2004, dir. Jared Hess), The Paper Chase (1973, dir. James Bridges), Rushmore (1998, dir. Wes Anderson), School Daze (1988, dir. Spike Lee), School of Rock (2003, dir. Richard Linklater), Superbad (2007, dir. Greg Mottola)